You earn more than 9 out of 10 people in Britain. You are not a homogenous group; indeed high earners are more diverse than any income group – after all, there is no roof to how much they can earn – but whether you are aware of it or not, your belonging to this category gives you particular political clout in the UK. The higher your income, the more likely you are to vote, to feel engaged with politics and to believe you have a say. You also have a relatively higher level of trust in politicians, despite overall rock-bottom levels among the public.
However, as we found out in researching Uncomfortably Off: Why addressing inequality matters, even for high earners, there are barriers to exercising that power. And this is a problem both for how you vote in the upcoming general election and how you use your influence in the next five years of an (almost certain) Labour government.
The first barrier is, strangely enough, a consequence of your relative success, which has been achieved through hard work, education, hopefully some family support and some luck. In fact, you are likely to be in a senior professional role in the institutions and organisations managing, protecting and regulating our economy and society. By dint of that and your high income, your relationship with the government is based on the tacit agreement you contribute to society through paying your taxes. This has worked perfectly fine up to now: the state leaves you alone, and you know you have access to private healthcare and private pensions, but public services are still there if you really need them.
However, like the rest of us, your working life is shaped by a ruthless logic, the prevailing economic ‘common sense’. While you may have a high-status job, so do your colleagues and superiors, who are generally the benchmark against which you assess your own position. And as they do, you need to constantly reassert your economic worth in a world of AI which has seen the precarisation of many previously solidly middle-class professions (think lawyers, doctors, academics, architects). Add to that our over-centralised parliamentary and our archaic first-past-the-post voting system (shared only in Europe with the authoritarian state of Belarus), and like most of us, you probably feel like economic and political change is currently done ‘to’ people rather than ‘by’ or ‘with’ people.
Outside of work, you have relatively little time. You donate to various causes that you care about but don’t volunteer. You are also likely to commute or work long hours from home so don’t get involved in or use local community amenities. One consequence is that you don’t spend much time with people on different incomes. This will affect the extent of inequality you perceive, its damaging impacts and the role of redistribution and public services in addressing it. This is particularly true of those working in the corporate and financial sectors, where lack of exposure to different income groups is a significant barrier to their understanding of the lives of a majority of society.
While you tend to keep up with political news and are relatively well informed, you don’t like what politics has become so don’t feel an affinity with any particular party and wouldn’t join one. This is perhaps why the Liberal Democrats appeal and, if you live in the blue wall constituencies in particular, are most likely to represent your protest vote, as you ‘believe in civil rights, are supportive of immigration, and accept as British those who feel British. But [your] social liberalism is combined with a more centrist outlook on economic issues. [You] would, for example, like more public spending but might not back increased taxes on high earners’.
There is then a contradiction. On the one hand, you are politically significant. On the other, you often feel politically disempowered and sceptical about the possibility of change beyond what already exists. And Aditya Chakrabortty describes your sense of anger, along with most of the public’s, ‘about long waits on the NHS … the degradation of their high streets and their public spaces and the general sense that nothing seems to work’.
At the same time, along with growing numbers of high earners, you are reporting that it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet. We have argued elsewhere that people on £60,000 and over should not be misrepresented as struggling. 90 per cent of Britons earn less. However, because of the level of inequality in Britain and in particular within this group, even someone in the top 3 per cent is, in absolute terms, closer to the median income earner than to the person at the bottom of the top 1 per cent. The higher they climb up the ladder, a one percentage point drop in income feels steep indeed. At the same time, earned income is so unequal (due to the worst pay squeeze for 200 years, a huge increase in insecure and low-quality work, and growing ill-health, ageing and inactivity, 31 million people don’t earn enough to pay any income tax). Meanwhile, 300,000 people in the top 1 per cent pay a third, the remaining earners in the top 10 per cent contribute another third, and the 90 per cent pay the rest. You may not have considered that a low-paid, increasingly inactive, chronically ill and ageing population, combined with a lack of political will to tax the wealthiest, means that the UK government is reliant for its tax take on an ever smaller group of employees. However, you do know that while work is paying less, income is taxed more than capital.
Because of the above, you probably don’t think your income should be taxed any more than it already is. However, at the same time, you underestimate your need for public services. High earners, for example, make by far the greatest use of public healthcare, given they live the longest and are least likely to die a quick death at a younger age.
Your children will also need public services more than you do. As we have written elsewhere, the likelihood of your children being in and maintaining secure occupations, owning a home and having a family without facing downward mobility is decreasing, especially without the bank of mum and dad. They may experience more challenges than you did in accessing resources, opportunities and rights. But crucially, the more we ignore the deeply entrenched disparities in our socioeconomic and political systems, and the more unequal it becomes (and inequality levels are projected to hit a record high in 2027/28), the worse the outcomes for all of us, on a range of indicators, as Wilkinson and Pickett have extensively demonstrated. What is more, if you, earning more than 9 out of 10 of the population, are feeling that life is more challenging, what does this signal about how well our economic, social and political systems are working?
Neither the Conservative offer of cutting taxes nor Labour’s meagre offer of depending on better future growth is sufficient to keep our economy and our services even functioning as they are now. It is an indictment of our so-called common sense that we need to be reminded that without investment, the economy will never be strong. If the buses don’t work, we can’t get to work. If we are sick and can’t see a GP, we can’t work. If childcare is too expensive, we can’t make work pay. As Maeve Cohen spells out, ‘Saying we can’t afford to pay nurses is back to front thinking … our economy is the sum total of our purchases, our work’. And the formal economy won’t get stronger if the informal economy isn’t invested in either as it is predicated on unpaid work.
The Centre for Progressive Studies has clarified that ‘£142 billion per year is needed by 2030 just to maintain public services at their current (already deeply struggling) levels, never mind improve them … without action on tax or a new approach to fiscal rules, spending cuts will be inevitable’. And as the Resolution Foundation puts it, ‘with much of Labour’s economic strategy resting on contentious reforms, rather than a step-change in investment, it’s unclear whether the measures set out will be enough to end stagnation – let alone secure the strongest growth in the G7’.
This Thursday, you will be casting your vote ‘in a knowledge vacuum’ as both parties have ‘hidden and ducked the hard economic choices ahead’. However, it is not too late for you and other fellow higher earners to use your political power to demand not just managerial competence from the next Labour government but the radical leadership and investment we all need if any of us are to remain comfortably off.
Marcos González Hernando is Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute, Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Diego Portales and Adjunct Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion.
Gerry Mitchell is a freelance policy researcher, working most recently for the Think-tank for Action on Social Change (Dublin), Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Stockholm and London) and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (Brussels).
Uncomfortably Off by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell is available here on Bristol University Press for £12.99.
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